Jim > Recent Status Updates

To me it always seemed necessary to watch a storm.

Supposing I were to not get out at all now—and drive back at once instead? But where to? To the little Pierrette? Or to the little trollop in Buchfeldgasse? Or to Marianne? Or home? And with a slight shudder he realized that there was nowhere he wanted to go less.

About the residents of Labrador: Melancholic insanity is not uncommon.

Geo Cartwright on Labrador: The astonished mariner is insensibly drawn to a conclusion that this country was the last that God made, and that he had no other view than to throw together there the refuse of his materials, as of no use to mankind.

Even the town's beggars would not be outperformed. Some danced, some sang. One had a vast hunchback of luggage at the top of which sat a chihuahua, barking directions like a mahout. Perhaps best of all was the Brown Paper Pope, with his brown paper mitre and his brown paper robes.
"Don't mess with me, Boy," he'd mutter. "I'm the f—ing Pope."

Residents of mental institutions are not usually brought by their keepers to the voting booth on Election Day. They fall too far short of the image of the citizen/voter that inspired the authors of the Federalist Papers. And yet people whose brains are picked in fantasy—people whose knowledge of the real world outside their own neighborhood may be close to nonexistent—are allowed to vote.

The rain's coming on again. Soderling has double-faulted; Federer's triumphal march to victory has begun. Perry's face is lit with simple awe and Gail discovers she is loving him all over again from scratch: his unaffected courage, his determination to do the right thing even if it's wrong, his need to be loyal and his refusal to be sorry for himself. She's his sister, friend, protector.

--What they tell her, the little girls, how their father die?
--In a car smash. Ten days ago. Outside Moscow. A tragedy. The father and mother both.
--Sure. Was tragedy. Was car smash. Very simple car smash. Very normal car smash. In Russia we get many such car smash. Four men, four Kalashnikov, maybe sixty bullet, who givva shit? That's a goddam car smash, Professor.

[Jefferson] was the kind of man who would have been able to take an oath—and if the technology for a lie detector test had been available, to have passed it—certifying that his slaves were more content and better off as members of his extended family than under any other imaginable circumstances.

The psychological agility required to sustain a sincere and highly visible affection for all things French, especially while simultaneously denouncing European decadence with equivalent sincerity, depended upon mysterious mechanisms inside Jefferson that prevented his different voices from hearing one another.

The attachment of the Indian to his home is a striking feature of his character. The affection which grows up between the sexes was supposed by the early writers upon the character of the Indians not to exist among them, and probably the sentiment and refinement of it do not; but circumstances and habit bind together the Indian man and woman as strongly as any known ties.

Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father, leaves fell lazily in Central Park.

So the moment of victory passed, without celebration. And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

Most of the [Polynesians] were tough and down to earth, a little gloomy and very religious. Where was the romance? I had no idea. Even the islands, so dramatic at a distance, were quite another story close up—muddy and jungly and priest-ridden, and the beaches teeming with no-see-ums they called nonos.

The great thing [in Samoa is to be a minister in the church. People give you food and money. You have status. You can be rich. But they regard me as ridiculous, because I am a doctor. When my surgery building blew down and was demolished in the hurricane everyone stood near it and laughed. 'Look at what happened! The doctor's house is down!' The Samoans thought it was very funny.

Yes. We don't need radios and cars and money. My people say, "We will drive our cars until we run out of petrol and then we will push them into the sea to make homes for fishes. We have canoes, we have food, we will dance and sing.

RLS on Marital Difficulties: "Something nameless and measureless seems to draw near and strikes me cold, and yet is welcome. Anything is welcome but the one horror of madness...."

Forget wholly and for ever all small pruderies, and remember that YOU CANNOT CHANGE ANCESTRAL FEELINGS OF RIGHT AND WRONG WITHOUT WHAT IS PRACTICALLY SOUL-MURDER. Barbarous as the customs may seem, always hear them with patience, always judge them with gentleness, always find in them some seed of good; see that you always develop them; remember that all you can do is to civilise the man in the line of his own civilis

As I recall this, I am struck with pity for the frailty of the human condition. What is so confined and short as even the longest life of man? You must think it is no time since Nero was still with us, yet meanwhile not one of those who held the consulship under him has remained alive.

And Hotel Terminus. I told myself that I should have rented a room in that neighborhood. Life is completely different when you live near a railway station. It feels as if you're just passing through. Everything is temporary. One day or another, you'll hop on a train. In those neighborhoods, the future is at your doorstep.

The story of how the city of Naples, Italy, rose up against the Nazi occupiers, led by scugnizzi -- street urchins.

There are times and places where the past becomes more vivid than the present, and the memory dominates the ear and eye; I found it so in the presence of the vestiges of Rome; I found it again in the city of refuge at Honaunau; and the strange, busy, and perilous existence of the old Hawaiian, the grinning idols of the heiau, the priestly murderers and the fleeting victim, rose before and mastered my imagination.

Kindly observe RLS in the talons of politics! 'Tis funny -- 'tis sad. Nobody but these cursed idiots could have so driven me; I cannot bear idiots.

I said I was tired; it is a mild phrase; my back aches like toothache; when I shut my eyes to sleep, I know I shall see before them—a phenomenon to which both Fanny and I are accustomed—endless vivid deeps of grass and weed, each plant particular and distinct, so that I shall lie inert in body, and transact for hours the mental part of my daily business, choosing the noxious from the useful.

At this day the Indians believe these old buildings [Maya ruins] are haunted, and that all the monefatos or ornaments are animated, and walk at night. In the daytime, it is believed, they can do no harm, and for ages the Indians have been in the habit of breaking and disfiguring them with the machete, believing that by so doing they quiet their wandering spirits.

Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

There was ambiguity in this, too: was the bird really trying to get out, or was the door [of its cage] just its favorite toy? Ambiguity was the secret of life, the very key to the universe!

We had a drink, Alyce drinking a Scotch and Soda and me a stinger. She evidently didn't know anything else to order; I could tell by her hesitation. Anybody who knows something else will never drink Scotch anyway. It tastes like wood smoke and weeds.

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.